


our own happily ever after

by navaan



Category: Fables - Willingham
Genre: Complicated Relationships, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, POV Female Character, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7144001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's the North Wind. She's the daughter of the Big Bad Wolf and Snow White. She has the knowledge of a godlike entity and millennia beyond her age, but part of her will always be her parent's daughter and another part of her is not good at relationships. As a wind it's hard for her to follow anything but her own ever changing ways. But ice and winter have a way of belonging together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our own happily ever after

Her mother is a legend even among Fables - and not all of that is because in the end Snow White tamed the Big Bad Wolf and helped built and keep Fable Town safe for as long as it was needed. It's certainly not because in the end she manged to settle down and build a loving family. Her mother’s story had always been complicated. The story of a girl, who grew into one of the strongest women Fablekind had ever seen. Hr legend, her tale, had always had been much bigger than herself, a story of overcoming adversity, of taking your own destiny into your own hands. And with all the gifts she'd derived from her father and grandfather it was easy for people to forget that at her core she was always her mother's daughter.

When Winter had been a small child, a timid pig-tailed girl in a pack of cubs, there had only been her mother to look up to. It had been years before Bigby returned to his family and became the father at her side, the wolf who ran with them. The mother she knew from the earliest days of her childhood had always put them first, had sacrificed her life in town to leave somewhere between the two worlds of Fable Town and the Farm. Even then, her mother hadn’t hesitated once when it came to them.

Her father had returned to them later, of course, as he had done again so many times after, and he too had shown them love. The Fables that for centuries had been the terror of all the lands and wood had become a loving father and husband. That was the story you still heard told often. But Winter, like all the cubs, knew that her father had never been just one of these. The wolf who had decided to turn man and take a place among the refugees in Fabletown had never given up the beast, he'd just found something more. He had grown up and gotten better.

Family, the pack, had always been the most important thing to both their parents. And still everyone knew that her father's eyes lit up when her mother entered the room and his smile turned that little bit more human. “Love,” he had told her once, when she was small enough to sit on his lap and listen to his stories, shy and human and still so small, while her siblings were running around in wolf form around them. “Love saved me.”

“Didn’t it save everyone?” she had asked, honestly curious. “You could have eaten everyone else if you wanted to.”

She still remembered the warmth in her father’s laughter.

Even now, centuries later, Winter remembered what it had been like to be carried in her mother’s loving embrace and snuggle close to her father when she was afraid. 

But her childhood had been short. Now she couldn’t even remember the last time when she’d truly been afraid. She was king. She was the North Wind. The world shivered in front of her wrath. Like her grandfather she was cold and fickle, ever changing and stronger than anyone. With her came ice and snow and the everlasting cold. She knew that her father had always feared this side of himself, the side that was too much like her grandfather. The grandfather who had left the wolf who had born her name before her.

“You’ll find happiness, Winter,” her mother said one day, perhaps 200 years into her new life with father in the wild woods of the homelands where nobody, not even Rose Red would find her; only their family knew where the Wolves dwelt now. “Don’t try too hard. Trying to hard only ends in tears.”

Centuries of knowledge and wisdom were hers even before she’d been a decade old, but now she was a girl again, sipping her mother’s herbal tea and wanting nothing more than her advice. “I thought… Well, I thought I would get bored,” she admitted. “I _am_ the North Wind. I change my ways.”

“But that’s not it, darling,” Snow White said and studied her calmly. “You still always want the same thing. You want to be loved.”

She knew her face gave nothing away and still her mother looked right into her soul. 

“There’s nothing wrong with divorce, mind you,” her mother continued. “My life would have been miserably if it hadn’t been an option.”

“I am cold,” Winter said.

“No, sweetheart,” - and nobody had called her that in so long that it nearly melted her icy heart - “you are just too much like your father. Your passion burns like a simmering fire, even if you think it impossible. Because you’re also too much like me. You keep yourself in check and hide yourself behind your own strength, like there’s a castle of ice around you. That’s why your anger is always cold. And it works quite well, I imagine, with the actual castle around you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t lie to myself, mother.”

“Which is why you married again, darling. You _do_ know that being the North Wind doesn’t mean you can’t have love. Perhaps you’re just looking in the wrong places. God knows, I did for far too long. And now look at me. Happily ever after.”

She smiled, because her mother could never know what it was like to a wind. She was magic and strength and a stubborn will to make things right, but she could never know what it was like to be one of them, and surely never what it was like to be the North Wind herself. Her parents were her parents though and while they were both not as wise and not as old as the knowledge of the North Wind that had been passed on to her, Winter treasured their advice above all. “How did you know?” she asked slowly. “How did you know that this time you found your one true love?”

And there was the laughter, that once had been so rare and now had become a constant, the one that turned her mother into a glowing young woman. “I never really did. It just happened somewhere along the way. It was not a straight path and it was not without complications. And then there were all you runts to take care of. And then somewhere along the line I realized that perfection has nothing to do with true love. Love has.”

It never sounded magical when she told the story. But the rest of all Fables knew the magic that had brought Snow White together with Bigby and about the love that still formed new legends. With all her power Winter knew she would not be able to force her own destiny to come to her.

She married again a year later.

* * *

Lumi was at her side when they brought snow and ice and true winter to the Dark One’s kingdom and topple a new Empire before it can threaten the piece of many of the Fables across their borders. She stood with her, as her adjutant and adviser when she took on the West Wind and won.

She knew the Snow Queen and her ways.

She had heard stories from a time long before and a time just now, from men who had fallen under her spell and payed the price when they could not melt her ice heart.

Lumi laughed when Winter told her about sending her latest husband to the end of the world, so she would never see him again.

“Oh,” she said. “I see mine all the time. They are all right here in my castle.”

Winter knew what it meant. “Really,” she said. “You need not to keep grudges, my dear. You'll run out of space to keep the ice statues.”

* * *

War broke out. Winter called. The Snow Queen came and took her place at her sovereign’s side. The arrangement suited them fine.

* * *

Lumi was the one who suggested it with a kiss and Winter, who had been grown up in all things but one by then, had taken her up on the offer. Now, lying in tangled sheets and feeling another cool body pressed up to her, as she panted and sweated and _came_ , she had to ask herself why she had never realized before who had been at her side for so long.

“I warn you,” she whispered. “I am fickle.”

“Prove it,” Lumi said and kissed her.

* * *

The Snow Queen sat in her ice castle. No husband had died at her hand to adorn her chambers for years and yet she was alone, no king or queen at her side to pass the time. Winter came to her as a wolf, as a wind, as a king or general, but she was never steady, never tamed and never bound. She came and went as she pleased and Lumi never tied her down.

She was also never boring or hurtful or purposefully treacherous. It was more than many of her husbands had ever given here.

* * *

Winter always ended up back here. A white chamber, white silk sheets and a lithe, white body pressed against her.

They were not like her parents. There were lovers. There were long months of absence. Winter roamed free. Lumi reigned with icy precision. 

But they always ended up back here.

“I think I love you,” she admitted, as she slipped out of bed.

“Of course, you do, Winter.” Lumi was already dressing, standing tall at the end of the bed. “Winter always loved me. I command ice and snow and the cold. Of course, you would love me.”

Nobody had called her Winter for a long time. Nobody called her anything but North Wind, who was not directly related to her – who wasn't wolf and not of her pack. Her name made a shiver run down her spine. “I love you. But I can't settle. I tried and I can never settle.” 

“I never asked you too. Winter is harsh and cold and so am I. There's no heart to break here.”

It was a lie that came too easy, because both their hearts had been broken over and over again, even if they couldn't allow themselves to show it. “I am a wind. I change all the time,” she warned, but longingly thought of that little voice in her head that sounded like her mother that talked of a true love waiting for everyone. Even grandfather had loved his family in the end, had learned to love her father's cubs.

Lumi's crystalline laughter rang through the halls. “One true love, my dear. Change however you want to, as long as you come back here. I am cold. I won't mind, but my wrath will be terrible if you think you can abandon me.”

She laughed too, thinking of all the husbands Lumi had punished for moving on from her.

The Snow Queen had tried to catch love in her palace of ice and snow and Winter had tried to find the love her parents had by looking among Fables and Mundies, trying to find her opposite. But everyone had their own happy ending. And her's was not an ending at all, not a beginning, just another sort of freedom.

“I'm a wolf too,” she warned.

“Howl at the moon if you need too.” Lumi shrugged. “Will you show it to me one day? Your wolf?”

She hadn't taken wolf form for a long time, but sometimes, when she went home, she ran with her father. “Will you promise me not to freeze any more ex-lovers in the basement?”

“Does that really bother you?”

Winter laughed. “It does.” She kissed Lumi good-bye with the knowledge that being caught without being held was what love meant to her.

Lumi let her go.

The North Wind went.

But Winter came back to her queen of snow and ice whenever she wanted to feel the comfort of her icy touch.

And this was how they lived happily ever after, not always sharing a castle or kingdom; not always being in the same place; not always fighting side by side, changing and everlasting; always old and new; cold and wintry, but never alone.

Her mother's love story had not always been a happy one. Her fairytale had had a good ending time and time again anyway. And Winter finally understood that it would be the same for her. There was no one happy ending, but many.


End file.
